The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

By Friedrich Engels, Jennifer Doyle and Eleanor Burke Leacock

In this provocative and now-classic work, Friedrich Engels explores the interrelated development of the family and the state from ancient society to the Victorian era. Drawing on new anthropological theories of his time, Engels argued that matriarchal communal societies had been overthrown by class society and its emphasis on private, not communal, property and monogamous, rather than polygamous, sexual organization. This historical development, Engels argued, constituted "the world-historic defeat of the female sex."

A masterclass in the application of materialist thought to history and anthropology, and touching on love, monogamy, property, and the development of the human, this landmark work is still foundational in Marxist and socialist feminist theory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Aug 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839761522

Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was, like Karl Marx, a German philosopher, historian, political theorist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. Unlike Marx, Engels was born to a wealthy family, but he used his family's money to spread his philosophy of empowering workers, exposing what he saw as the bourgeoisie's sinister motives and encouraging the working class to rise up and demand their rights. He wrote several works in collaboration with Marx - most famously "The Communist Manifesto" - and supported Marx financially after he was forced to relocate to London. Following Marx's death, Engels compiled the second and third volumes of Das Kapital, ensuring that this seminal document would live on. He continued writing for the rest of his life and died in London in 1894.

Book preview

The Origin of the Family,

Private Property and

the State

Friedrich Engels

Foreword by Jennifer Doyle

Introduction by Eleanor Burke Leacock

Translated by Alick West (revised by Dona Torr)

Transcribed and modernized by Brian Basgen

This edition first published by Verso 2021

First published as Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats 1884

Translation © Alick West 1942

Foreword © Jennifer Doyle 2021

Introduction © Eleanor Burke Leacock 1979, 2021

Additional annotations © Brian Basgen 2021

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-151-5

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-153-9 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-152-2 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Engels, Friedrich, 1820–1895, author. | West, Alick, translator.

Title: The origin of the family, private property, and the state / Friedrich Engels ; foreword by Jennifer Doyle ; introduction by Eleanor Burke Leacock ; translated by Alick West (revised by Dona Torr) ; transcribed and modernized by Brian Basgen.

Other titles: Ursprung der Familie. English

Description: Paperback Edition. | Brooklyn : Verso Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Friedrich Engels explores the interrelated development of the family and the state from the ancient world to the Victorian era. Drawing on the anthropological theories of his time, Engels argues that class-based societies overthrew their matriarchal predecessors, replacing a communal, polygamous culture with one that was monogamous and property-bound— Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020051732 (print) | LCCN 2020051733 (ebook) | ISBN 9781839761515 (paperback) | ISBN 9781839761539 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Primitive societies. | Families—History. | Property—History. | State, The.

Classification: LCC HQ504 .E613 2021 (print) | LCC HQ504 (ebook) | DDC 306.8509—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051732

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051733

Typeset in Minion by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed in the [country] by [printer]

Contents

About the Authors

Editor’s Note

Foreword by Jennifer Doyle

Introduction: Engels and the History of Women’s Oppression by Eleanor Burke Leacock

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

Preface to the First Edition

Preface to the Fourth Edition

I. Stages of Prehistoric Culture

II. The Family

1. The Consanguine Family, the First Stage of the Family

2. The Punaluan Family

3. The Pairing Family

4. The Monogamous Family

III. The Iroquois Gens

IV. The Greek Gens

V. The Rise of the Athenian State

VI. The Gens and the State in Rome

VII. The Gens among Celts and Germans

VIII. The Formation of the State among the Germans

IX. Barbarism and Civilization

Appendix: A Recently Discovered Case of Group Marriage

Notes

Index

About the Authors

Friedrich Engels was born in 1820 in the German city of Barmen. He was brought up as a devout Calvinist, and moved to England in 1842 to work in his father’s Manchester textile firm. After joining the fight against the counterrevolution in Germany in 1848, he returned to Manchester and the family business, finally settling there in 1850. In subsequent years he provided financial support for Marx and edited the second and third volumes of Capital. He died while working on the fourth volume, in 1895.

Jennifer Doyle is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she researches and teaches literary and cultural studies, visual and performance studies, art history, gender studies, sports, and critical theory. She has curated exhibitions for the Vincent Price Art Museum and the Broad Museum, and is a member of the board of directors at Human Resources, Los Angeles, a space dedicated to performance-based art. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Deadspin, Social Text, Cabinet, and World Literature Today, and her books include Campus Sex, Campus Security; Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art; and Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire.

Eleanor Burke Leacock (1922–1987) was well known for her ethnographic work among primitive societies. Her research is still a formative influence among feminist anthropologists. Her introduction and notes to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State helped introduce the text to a new wave of feminist scholars and activists in the 1970s.

Editor’s Note

This work was first published as Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats in Hottingen-Zürich in 1884. Alick West’s English translation was first published in 1942.

This text is revised against the German as it appeared in Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Werke, Volume 21 (Dietz Verlag, 1962), with modernization of names and other terms. Transcription and markup were done by Zodiac and Brian Basgen, proofing and corrections by Mark Harris in 2010.

This text appears on the digital Marxists Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1993, 1999, 2000, and with revised footnotes by Brian Basgen from 2020, and appears here with permission.

Eleanor Burke Leacock’s Engels and the History of Women’s Oppression first appeared in Ruby Rohrlich-Leavitt, ed., Women, Cross-Culturally: Change and Challenge (Mouton, 1975), and appears here with permission from Monthly Review.

The reader is advised that there are three separate sets of annotations to Engels’s main text: those done by Engels himself, who included several new annotations for the fourth edition of the text; those by Eleanor Burke Leacock for a 1972 publication of the text; and those by Brian Basgen for Marxists Internet Archive, updated in 2020. All annotations from Leacock and Basgen are marked with their initials; other footnotes should be understood to be placed by Engels himself.

Foreword

Our sexual lives unfold within the social systems into which we are born, and against which many of us struggle. Love, shame, beauty: these things are material expressions of those systems, as is a sense of family, race and sex. The shape and direction of desire, its objects, the sense of what satisfaction is or whose desires matter, who gets to have or to be a family, what pleasures are good and attainable, what pleasures are forbidden and unspeakable—these modes of relation and systems of value are local and have histories. The aim of this book is to make you feel just this: your life is a material expression of an evolving system that precedes you, that conjures and constitutes you.

The son of wealthy textile manufacturers, Engels enjoyed the good life that fortune afforded him, shared his wealth (including famously to support Marx’s writing), and (mostly) rebelled against the bourgeois values he was expected to embody. Scandalously for a man of his background, he had a long-term relationship with a working-class Irish woman, whom he met while working for one of his family’s businesses in Manchester. Accounts of their relationship credit Mary Burns with guiding him through miserable corners of the city and providing him with insights necessary to the development of The Condition of the Working Class in England, an incendiary work whose content and tone anticipate The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.¹ In an intentional rejection of bourgeois values, the two never married. One gets the impression, however, that this decision made things easier for Engels socially—Mary was by all accounts functionally illiterate and, one imagines with good reason, outspoken. He was devastated when she died, suddenly, at forty: she and Engels had been together twenty years. Marx’s apparent indifference to his friend’s grief is, according to biographical lore, the source of their one major argument.

We know little about Mary Burns, despite her obvious importance. After she died, Engels took up with Mary’s formidable sister Lizzie, who had lived with them and helped take care of the household. When Lizzie became Engels’s partner, another Burns woman (Mary Ellen, a niece) moved into the house and took up Lizzie’s work.

I like to think that Engels chose to live not with a wife, but with women. This household was maintained at a slight remove from his public life, however: these women lived in a second home, and their relationship with Engels was sustained as an open secret. As becomes clear to readers of this text, Engels was drawn to the idea of worlds in which women enjoyed more sexual freedom, children were raised with many mothers, and social authority was shared and even, in important ways, centered on women. He participated in the whole-cloth critique of the institution of marriage and, in this work, echoed the position of feminists of the era (such as Victoria Woodhull) who condemned marriage as a state-sanctioned form of prostitution.

Sexual life inhabits the margins of much of Marx’s and Engels’s work. The origin of private property, they write in The German Ideology, lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband.² In Capital, sex difference quietly anchors Marx’s elaborations on the division of labor (the distribution of labour within the family and the labor-time expended by the individual members of the family, are regulated by differences of age and sex³). Sex workers step forward as the embodiments of what capitalism does to the soul: Prostitution, we learn from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, "is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the laborer.⁴ Sex is a vanishing point in which we disappear into nature; the distinction between men and women operates as a powerful given: the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being; it is the direct, natural and necessary relation of person to person; in the relationship of man to woman, men’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as man’s relation to man is immediately his relation to nature—his own natural function."⁵ Concentrate on the language of sex/gender in Marxist literature and you might get dizzy: the division of the world of labor into production and reproduction is rooted in so-called natural distinctions between men and women, but the scaffolding for that binary narrative is remarkably brittle. In general, Marx and Engels’s writing about gender difference is most compelling not where the gender binary stabilizes their thought, but where it crumbles and falls apart.

Industrial capital poisons and rips open the family. This fact supplies much of the outrage that propels Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England. There, in the stinking rag heap of that book’s unrelenting inventory of human miseries, one finds a set of provocations about the family. Because their labor is systemically devalued and because women and children are, on the whole, smaller than men, women and children are both more suited to operating factory machines and more desirable as workers. They cost less; they take up less space. Engels shares stories about women driven to work days after giving birth, leaking milk into their clothes, and babies fed laudanum (an opiate) to keep them quiet. As work for men dries up, they find themselves stuck at home, stewing in squalor and rage. This condition, he writes in prose that distills itself into sneering irony,

unsexes the man and takes from the woman all womanliness without being able to bestow upon the man true womanliness, or the woman true manliness—this condition which degrades, in the most shameful way, both sexes, and, through them, Humanity, is the last result of our much-praised civilisation, the final achievement of all the efforts and struggles of hundreds of generations to improve their own situation and that of their posterity.⁶

Scenes of disordered sexual life punctuate this portrait of the impact of industrial capital on the lives of the working poor. Men, women and children sleep in revolting confusion, disordered functions of the uterus are almost universal among girls, and working women manifest an actual dislike to family life.⁷ Sex is chaotic, pregnancies are illegitimate and early, and prostitution rampant. Engels’s anger flows from one breathless sentence to another. He pulls our attention up from the gutter every now and again to offer startling propositions:

We must either despair of mankind, and its aims and efforts, when we see all our labour and toil result in such a mockery, or we must admit that human society has hitherto sought salvation in a false direction; we must admit that so total a reversal of the position of the sexes can have come to pass only because the sexes have been placed in a false position from the beginning. If the reign of the wife over the husband, as inevitably brought about by the factory system, is inhuman, the pristine rule of the husband over the wife must have been inhuman too. If the wife can now base her supremacy upon the fact that she supplies the greater part, nay, the whole of the common possession, the necessary inference is that this community of possession is no true and rational one, since one member of the family boasts offensively of contributing the greater share. If the family of our present society is being thus dissolved, this dissolution merely shows that, at bottom, the binding tie of this family was not family affection, but private interest lurking under the cloak of a pretended community of possessions.⁸

That word pretended denaturalizes the monogamous, patriarchal family; the juxtaposition of community and possessions is meant to shock us out of our sentimental attachments to marriage and home. Marxist literature is haunted by the injuries that private property systems inflict on what is taken to be our most intimate forms of relation. It is also activated by a sense that things might be otherwise.

The denaturalization of intimacy practices (for example, marriage) and their attendant identity formations (wife, mother, and so on) are received by some people as an affront—a negation of a sense of natural order and being. It can take work to recognize and appreciate the fact that we experience the phenomena of being in a body through dynamic, contingent structures of thought and feeling and that where nature ends and culture begins is never a given, if only because the very idea of nature is itself a social thing. Yes, the body is there—my point is not that the body is a mirage. It is, more nearly, that the body is a thing we live through. Furthermore, we live through our bodies together.

Some know this all too well, as our experiences of the body, love and desire are marked by one system or another as alien and unnatural. We feel the relationship between our lives and the state when the social worker knocks on the door to check unannounced on the quality of our homes; when we get on busses, trains, even planes to get the abortions we need but which our local governments deny us; when we are policed while using the women’s bathroom; when our families cut us out of their lives; when whole governments mobilize to manage us out of existence. Some of us can feel, in the thickening of the atmosphere of a room, the degree to which we are conjured, desired and feared. You may be picking up this volume because you feel these entanglements.

If sexual life haunts the margins of much of Marx’s and Engels’s texts, it is in The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State that the ghost is confronted. The book’s title is an argument: if there is an origin story for these three structures, there is also a time before—a world populated by other forms of kinship and relationships to people, resources and to land. And, indeed, much of the book is dedicated to representing the work of those who studied kinship practices across the globe and across time, and who attempted to map the relationship between kinship and socio-political dynamics.

Eleanor Burke Leacock’s introduction will orient you towards the book’s strengths and its limits as a work of anthropology. She importantly reminds readers that Engels’s work was, for a long time, relegated to the status of a ‘woman’s book,’ peripheral to the scholarly domain. It still sits there, sought out by scholars of feminist thought and those Marxists who commit themselves to understanding the relationship between sexual and economic life. The book’s assertions, especially those concerning matrilineal kinship systems, were shocking not only for its first readers, but for the generations of twentieth-century scholars who worked to shore up the disciplinary architecture of white patriarchy.

This book declares that one cannot theorize the operations of a private property system without understanding social systems of belonging and exclusion that manage the reproduction of life and labor. Even though intersectional modes of analysis do not inform the text, when Engels centers kinship and social reproduction in his analysis, he makes an important contribution to the development of intersectional practices in Marxist thought. A full reckoning with the relationship between division, alienation and exploitation requires theoretical models like Gayle Rubin’s sex/gender system (a systematic social apparatus which takes up females as raw materials and fashioned domesticated women as products), and Cedric Robinson’s theorizations of racial capitalism and Black radical contributions to anti-capitalist struggle, to name just two major figures who have taken on the kinds of questions that drive this work. I encourage people to read Engels’s work in the intellectual and historical context of its composition, as well as the intersectional, decolonial contexts through which we read it today.

This book grew out of Marx’s notes on Lewis H. Morgan’s works, which include League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851), Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871), and Ancient Society: Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877).⁹ Marx and Engels followed and debated ethnological work of the period: both saw, in the general intellectual project of the emerging discipline, a potential ally for their own work exploring social transformation over time. After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels took on the work of realizing his collaborator’s unpublished projects. Lewis Morgan’s work figured heavily in Marx’s papers. Morgan presented forms of human society as emerging in dynamic tension with the natural environment: the family, in his work, is a mobile, historically contingent, and material structure. Importantly, for Marx and Engels, Morgan links the specific shape and character of kinship systems to the access and control of material resources. He offers a developmental model in which one kinship system evolves from and retains the traces of another; these stages in the evolution of kinship are also, in Morgan’s work, associated with the emergence of a wide range of cultural developments (for example, the use of certain kinds of tools, the development of language, property relations etcetera.).

Marx and Engels recognized elements of their own intellectual project in Morgan’s emphasis on the relationship between material conditions (such as the availability of resources, population growth and so on) and social systems. Drawing from the American’s work, Engels argues that the forms that hold our sense of family and belonging have a developmental origin in mother-centered societies characterized by group marriage, greater forms of sexual autonomy (for example, marriages that were more easily dissolved) and also by group parenting. In a direct challenge to the thinking of the day, he identifies the unraveling of these social forms not as a manifestation of men’s inherent strength and natural inclination but as an effect of the development of practices enabling a shift from labor oriented by immediate need to labor oriented towards producing goods that could be stored, exchanged, and transmitted from one generation to another. As these systems evolve, women, via their reproductive capacity, become a resource controlled by a patriarchal head of the household, through whom lines of inheritance are articulated.

The spirit of Engels’s linking of family structures with property systems and his developmental argument is lifted directly from Morgan’s work. Origins closes with a long citation from Morgan’s work, pulled from the conclusion to Ancient Society. Since the advent of civilization, that passage opens, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation (119). For Marx and Engels, work like Morgan’s was important to the dismantling of exactly this bewilderment. Morgan’s Ancient Society, in particular, showed that it was possible to historicize relationships between people, and between people and property. The project furthermore implicates intimacy and kinship in larger systems: the family is a fractal expression of the logic of the whole. (In his notes on Morgan’s text, Marx asserts that the modern family contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state [57].)

Origins more than earns its place on the feminist bookshelf. As Imani Perry writes, we encounter modern patriarchy at the intersection of three legal formations, personhood, sovereignty, and property—an intersection from which it generates human shapes for each of these categories.¹⁰ We see roots for this feminist argument in Engels’s text. It is punctuated by lacerating sentences that describe the patriarchal family as a sinister entanglement of marriage and ownership. For Engels, the world historical defeat of the female sex (56) was precipitated in part (and most crucially) by the accumulation of chattel—livestock and slaves. The word family, he reminds us, has its roots in a Latin term invented by the Romans to denote a new social organism, whose head ruled over wife and children and a number of slaves, and was invested under Roman paternal power with rights of life and death over them all (57). This form of patriarchy, he declares, produces its own unholy trinity of subordinates: wife, prostitute and slave. Engels writes,

It is the existence of slavery side by side with monogamy, the presence of young, beautiful slaves belonging unreservedly to the man, that stamps monogamy from the very beginning with its specific character of monogamy for the woman only, but not for the man. And that is the character it still has today. (33)

Within this form of the family, which reproduces itself across time in the controlled transmission of property from one generation to the next through a paternal line, women become property’s intimates—they are its managers, they are property themselves and they are an amalgamation of both. This family system is deeply implicated in Capitalist forms of exploitation and, Engels argues, must be dismantled: it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society (73).

Marxist feminists have pushed these arguments much further. The problem, for the Marxist feminist reader, lies not in Engels’s spirited critique of the patriarchal, monogamous family unit, but in the sense of evolutionary progression that locates women in a kind of pre-colonial, pre-capitalist space, and which situates the path to liberty in women’s entry into the proletariat.¹¹ Marx’s notes on Morgan emphasize Morgan’s take on the family as a kind of social fossil, holding people in archaic forms of relation ("The modern family contains in germ not only slavery [servitus], but also serfdom [57]). Non-feminist Marxist work underestimates the importance of reproduction, as underdeveloped" (undervalued, underpaid, difficult to index, and so on.), to capitalism’s functioning.¹² Had they taken as their paradigmatic labor form the combinations of enslaved, free and waged labor staged on and around the plantation, extending their view from the textile mills to slave markets and the cotton fields, Marx and Engels might have written differently about the family and tied the narrative offered in Origins more closely to the processes they elsewhere theorize as primitive accumulation.

Marx defines primitive accumulation as nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive, because it forms the prehistoric stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it.¹³ The figuration of primitive accumulation as a prehistorical stage of capital is hard to sustain, however, when one considers, for example, the suite of not-so-ancient practices that, as Hortense Spillers writes, demarcate a total objectification, as an entire captive community becomes a living laboratory.¹⁴ This zone is important to Cedric Robinson’s interventions: he writes, certainly slave labor was one of the bases for what Marx termed ‘primitive accumulation.’ But it would be an error to arrest the relationship there, assigning slave labor to some ‘pre-capitalist’ stage of history. The failure to take up these large questions (that is, the

Reviews for The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

[urbandale · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Leacock's introduction and editorial notes make this version practically essential.

[the7ken7petersen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting, but showing its age.